But time has set its maggot on their track.

Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?

And I think it’s that time. And I think if you just step aside and Mr. Romney can kind of take over. You can maybe still use a plane. Though maybe a smaller one. Not that big gas guzzler you are going around to colleges and talking about student loans and stuff like that.

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God’s language – it’s better, it’s finer, it’s language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.

The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.

Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn’t a rule about this. But there’s a tidy sense about many stories I read. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

You don’t have to be a renowned artist like Q-Tip to try your hand at poetry. You don’t need any special equipment – that’s the beauty of it.

They might not need me; but they might. I’ll let my head be just in sight; a smile as small as mine might be precisely their necessity.

Time, which alone makes the reputation of men, ends by making their defects respectable.

I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever. I’m not really book-smart.

The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.

Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul – and sings the tunes without the words – and never stops at all.

It is said that the present is pregnant with the future.

I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.

No poet or orator has ever existed who believed there was any better than himself.

For me, time is the greatest mystery of all. The fact is that we’re dreaming all the time. That’s what really gets me. We have a fathomless lake of unconsciousness just beneath our skulls.

I’ve always written. There’s a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother’s papers were destroyed. I’d written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.

Still round the corner there may wait, A new road or a secret gate.

Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds.

Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them.

I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn’t until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.

Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.

Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.

I have not worked out my poems with a careful will, falling rather on haphazard and blind formulation of wordage, a more flowing concept, in a hope for a more new and lively path. I do personalize at times, but this only for the grace and elan of the dance.

You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.

Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.

And whether you’re an honest man, or whether you’re a thief, depends on whose solicitor has given me my brief.

I’m sorry, it’s true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We’re born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It’s been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much – if at all.

For time is the longest distance between two places.

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.

Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.

Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.

I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.

The waving of a pine tree on the top of a mountain – a magic wand in Nature’s hand – every devout mountaineer knows its power; but the marvelous beauty value of what the Scotch call a breckan in a still dell, what poet has sung this?

Poetry and lyrics are very similar. Making words bounce off a page.

Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.

May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.

Life is so, so short. Bible says it’s like a vapor.

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

I liked to write from the time I was about 12 or 13. I loved to read. And since I only spoke to my brother, I would write down my thoughts. And I think I wrote some of the worst poetry west of the Rockies. But by the time I was in my 20s, I found myself writing little essays and more poetry – writing at writing.

If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little – somebody who is obsessed by Making.

I learn poetry, learn text, and that really keeps you alive.

It’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail.

They would not find me changed from him they knew – only more sure of all I thought was true.

I don’t think that the total creation took place in six days as we now measure time. If we can confirm, say, the Big Bang theory, that doesn’t at all cause me to question my faith that God created the Big Bang.

My favorite things in life don’t cost any money. It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.

For most of us, wisdom is acquired in the thicket of experience and usually meets us somewhere along the way if we live long enough. But sooner is better than later.

He ate and drank the precious Words, his Spirit grew robust; He knew no more that he was poor, nor that his frame was Dust.

Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.

There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.